Donald Trump on Immigration

2000 Reform Primary Challenger for President

Citizenship for illegal immigrants is a GOP suicide mission

Donald Trump said the Republican party will lose elections if it reforms the nation's entitlement programs and will hand
Democrats 11 million votes if Congress grants citizenship to illegal immigrants, likening the reform efforts to a "suicide mission."
"The fact is 11 million people will be voting Democratic. You can be out front. You can be the spearhead. You can do whatever you want to do, but every one of those 11 million people will be voting Democratic," he said. "It is just the way it
works."

"You have to be very, very careful, because you could say that to a certain extent the odds aren't looking so great for Republicans, that you are on a suicide mission," he said. "You are just not going to get those votes."

351,000 illegal aliens are in our prisons; costing $1.1B

America's prisons house 351,000 criminal aliens who committed a crime after having already broken the law by entering American illegally.
Making taxpayers pay for 351,000 criminals who should never have been here in the first place is ridiculous. The annual price tag to incarcerate these thugs is $1.1 billion. And get this: criminal aliens have an average of seven arrests.
That's at least seven crimes committed against American citizens by each of these criminals who should never have been allowed to cross our borders.

One out of every three federal prison inmates is a Latino, and three quarters of these are here illegally.

Anchor babies were NEVER the intent of the 14th Amendment

The root cause of all the welfare payments to illegal aliens is the so-called "anchor baby" phenomenon, which is when illegal immigrant mothers have a baby on American soil. The child automatically becomes an American citizen,
Though this was NEVER the intention of the Fourteenth Amendment, which states, "All citizens born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and the state wherein they reside."
The clear purpose of the Fourteenth Amendment, ratified in 1868, three years after the end of the
Civil War, was to guarantee full citizenship rights to now emancipated former slaves. It was not intended to guarantee untrammeled immigration to the United States.

Invite foreigners graduating from college to stay in US

Our country's leaders are just so plan stupid. As an example, foreign students come over to our colleges, learn everything there is to learn about physics, finance, mathematics, and computers, and graduate with honors. They would love to stay in this
country, but we don't allow them to. We immediately ship them back to their country to use all of the knowledge they learned at the best colleges in the United States back in their country rather than keep it here in ours.

When we have gifted people in this country we should cherish them and let them stay. But instead we fling our arms wide open to the lowlifes, the criminals, the people who have no intention to contribute to our country.

Wouldn't it be better if we
invited foreign student graduating from our colleges to stay to build American companies, instead of foreign companies that will be wreaking havoc against Boeing, Caterpillar, and many other of our great American companies in the future?

Triple-layered fence & Predator drones on Mexican border

I am impressed with the success of the double- and triple-layered fence in places like Yuma, Arizona. The wall there is a serious 20-foot wall. It has three walls separated by 75-yard "no man's lands" for border agents to zoom up and down in vehicles.
It also has cameras, radio systems, radar, and pole-topped lights. After the triple-layered fence was installed, the 120-mile stretch of the US-Mexican border known as the Yuma sector experienced a 72 percent plunge in illegal immigrant apprehensions.

We need to be ready to build other kinds of fences, too. The point is that properly built walls work. We just need the political will to finish the job. And by the way, finishing the job will employ a lot of construction workers. Moreover, I call on
Congress and the president to hire another 25,000 border patrol agents and give them the aerial equipment they need, such as Predator drones, to provide real-time aerial reconnaissance information to agents guarding the border wall.

Control borders; even legal immigration should be difficult

America is experiencing serious social and economic difficulty with illegal immigrants who are flooding across our borders. We simply can’t absorb them. It is a scandal when America cannot control its own borders. A liberal policy of immigration may seem
to reflect confidence and generosity. But our current laxness toward illegal immigration shows a recklessness and disregard for those who live here legally.

The majority of legal immigrants can often make significant contributions to our society
because they have special skills and because they add to our nation’s cultural diversity. They come with the best of intentions. But legal immigrants do not and should not enter easily. It’s a long, costly, draining, and often frustrating
experience-by design. I say to legal immigrants: Welcome and good luck.

It comes down to this: we must take care of our own people first. Our policy to people born elsewhere should be clear: Enter by the law, or leave.